Golf in the (United) Kingdom: No Need to Pack Shorts

Posted on July 29, 2012 by David Owen

Lower right: the shorts rule at Hillside Golf Club, May, 2010.

When I played Royal Lytham & St. Annes in 2008, on assignment for Golf Digest, a local man in the group ahead of mine was wearing shorts—a great rarity on golf courses almost anywhere in the British Isles. A sign at Hillside Golf Club (a fantastic non-Open course, next door to Birkdale, where I’d played the afternoon before) warns golfers that shorts are permitted only if they are “tailored” and worn with “tall hose”—a requirement that neatly defeats the purpose of wearing shorts. Lytham used to have a similar rule, but relaxed it after a busload of barelegged Americans exhausted the golf shop’s supply of tall hose.

Tony at Hillside, properly attired, on a later trip, May, 2010.

The first hole at Hillside doesn’t look like much, but the course gets better and better from there, and the second nine is really terrific. (Greg Norman once called it the greatest second nine in Britain.) The tenth is a “short” par 3, which plays uphill and into the prevailing wind to a seemingly sheltered but impossible green. You watch the group ahead of you nosing around for lost balls on every side. They wave your group up, and then you lose all your balls, too.

Tenth hole, Hillside.

Toward the end of my round in 2008, I got stuck behind four bad golfers, one of whom was constantly throwing up grass to gauge the direction of wind that was so strong it was knocking over his golf bag. I passed the time by chatting with four visitors from the Isle of Man, who had caught up to me from behind. They gave me a British 10-pence coin with the Manx triskelion—the symbol of the Isle of Man—on the reverse. It was my favorite ball marker until I lost it.

The three legs of Man: my favorite ball marker until I lost it.

Martha’s Vineyard, Golf, Lyme Disease

Posted on July 27, 2012 by David Owen

Penny (left) and deer tick.

My wife and I are on Martha’s Vineyard, where the vacation activities include looking for, finding, and removing deer ticks, which carry Lyme disease. None of this is easy, because the ticks are extraordinarily small. Here’s an enlarged detail from the photo above, in case you’re having trouble spotting the tick.

Penny and deer tick (detail).

I found the tick above between two of my toes and stuck it to a piece of paper with Scotch tape. It’s one of several dozen I’ve found so far, all of them on my feet and legs. I’ll let you know in a week or two whether I’ve contracted Lyme again.

Luckily, tick-hunting isn’t the only vacation activity around here. There’s also golf, on a course I like a lot, Farm Neck Golf Club, in Oak Bluffs. Here’s one of my favorite holes, the fourth, a par 3, on which you don’t want to be right, long, left, or short, but especially not right or long.

I forgot to mention the wind.

And here are the people I played with today, a roughly my-age guy, whose name was Richard, and his two sons-in-law. In the photo, Richard has just missed a short par putt after making a semi-miraculous chip shot from the edge of the cart path.

That’s Richard, on the right. I hit the green but three-putted.

I didn’t notice any ticks on the golf course, but there were lots of these other things, which are almost as annoying:

Bad Golf Swings in Advertisements

Posted on July 24, 2012 by David Owen

Photograph from recent advertisement for Americana Manhasset.

I used to have a folder containing golf-themed magazine advertisements in which the models clearly knew nothing about golf. I saved it for years and years and years—and then, at some point, I must have thrown it away, because I’ve turned my house upside down without finding it. However, I did notice the photograph above in a recent issue of the New York Times, in an advertisement for a shopping mall called Americana Manhasset, which describes itself as “the premier luxury shopping destination on Long Island’s North Shore, close to Manhattan and the Hamptons.” The scene isn’t meant to be realistic, of course, but I can’t help feeling annoyed by the guy’s grip, by the fact that the putting green isn’t a putting green, by the fact that he’s putting with what looks like a 6-iron, and by the fact that the woman is wearing high heels and therefore making a deep gouge with every step. Also, of course, they’ve parked their camper on the putting surface, if that’s what it’s supposed to be.

I did turn up this MasterCard advertisement from 2005:

Nothing unusual there—except that one of the guy’s golf balls is light blue, and his golf bag and golf clubs are apparently reproducing the way hydras do, by budding. In the closeup below, you can see the offspring bag (and duplicated putter) forming on the left, under the main bag. Look closely:

I wouldn’t at all mind posting more examples of this kind of thing. I’m especially interested in bad grips and bad swings. Anybody got anything?

Memory Aid: You Moved Your Ball Marker?

Posted on July 22, 2012 by David Owen

Foolproof aide-mémoire, patent pending.

You mark your ball on a putting green. Your coin is in another player’s line, so he asks you to move it one putter-head length to the side. When it’s your turn to putt, you have to remember to move your coin back before replacing your ball and making your own putt, because if you don’t you incur a penalty of two strokes (in stroke play) or loss of hole (in match play). (See Rule 20-7.)

This actually happens. At the Crowne Plaza Invitational, back in May, Zach Johnson forgot to replace his coin on the final green and incurred a two-stroke penalty for putting from the wrong place. Luckily, he had a three-stroke lead, and someone noticed the mistake before he’d signed an incorrect card.

In a local tournament many years ago, an opponent of mine moved his marker at my request, then forgot to move it back. I noticed and reminded him before he putted—and he was as astonished as if I had handed him a thousand dollars. “You’d have won the hole if you’d let me putt,” he said, suggesting that he wouldn’t have done the same for me. Who would want to win a hole that way? Him, I guess.

There’s a foolproof way to remember that you, a partner, or an opponent has moved a marker: stick a tee in your nose and leave it there until the marker is back where it began. That’s what I do, anyway. (See photo above.)

Recently, my friend Rick and I played in a state senior tournament, and my tee-in-nose trick kept us out of trouble with Rule 20-7. The course was nice, too, although its address was even better. Here’s a picture of the street sign on the corner nearest the clubhouse:

Actually, it’s kind of amazing that the sign was still there. If I’d been forty years younger, I might have swiped it myself. (No penalty under the Rules of Golf, in either stroke play or match play.) My home club is on Golf Course Rd. Here’s what our street sign looks like:

I swear I’m not the one who took it.

Beef Box*: Another Reason to Get Rid of All the Television Commentators

Posted on July 19, 2012 by David Owen

If you’ve been watching the Open on TV, you’ve undoubtedly heard the commentators refer to this or that hole as the “easiest” or “hardest” at Royal Lytham & St. Annes. They’re always wrong, and here’s why: there’s a difference between an easy hole and an easy par. A par 5 on which the scoring average is 4.5 is a harder hole than a par 3 on which the scoring average is 3.5, even though the par 5 is easier to birdie. The ease or difficulty of any golf hole is determined solely by the number of strokes taken to play it. Whether that number is higher or lower than “par” is immaterial.

A club near where I live recently shortened a par 5 by thirty yards and renamed it a par 4. The consensus among members is that this change made both the hole and the course “harder.” Actually, though, it made both of them easier, since the hole and the course are now thirty yards shorter than they were before—the same effect as adding thirty yards to everyone’s tee shot. The hole is now tougher to par than it used to be, but it’s nevertheless an easier hole, since the average number of strokes needed to play it has come down.

To see this more clearly, forget about par for a moment. Imagine that Tiger Woods has challenged you to a two-hole match, on the second and twelfth holes at Augusta National, and that he has offered to give you one handicap stroke, which you may use on either hole. Would that stroke be more useful to you on the second (a 575-yard par 5) or on the twelfth (a 155-yard par 3 where Tom Weiskopf scored a cumulative 20 during the first two rounds of the Masters in 1980)?

Conventional wisdom says that Augusta’s twelfth is a “harder” hole than the second — Jack Nicklaus once called the twelfth “the toughest tournament hole in golf” — but wouldn’t you rather have your stroke on the second, which is 400 yards longer? If you wouldn’t, you should. Tom Weiskopf notwithstanding, the second is a harder hole. Woods has a very good chance of reaching the green in two, while you’ll have to play well to get there in three.

*With apologies to Joe Pyne.

British Open Countdown: St. Annes Old Links Golf Club

Posted on July 18, 2012 by David Owen

Airplane, roller coaster, Yankees headcover, Other Gene, out of bounds: St. Annes Old Links has it all.

Just a few blocks from Royal Lytham & St. Annes, where this year’s Open is being held, is St. Annes Old Links Golf Club. From the parking lot, it looks like a down-at-heels muni, and it’s usually ignored by non-locals. You can see the whole course without turning your head, there’s an airfield over the fence, and the northern vista is dominated by the roller coaster at Blackpool, a seaside holiday spot whose nearest American analogs are Coney Island and some of the tawdrier parts of the New Jersey coast. (Prosperous Britons view Blackpool as beneath them, but your children wouldn’t.) Still, the course is far better than it looks, and it’s worth a visit (as is the roller coaster).

The roller coaster in Blackpool in 1983, when I rode it twice.

St. Annes is of historical interest as well, because it occupies part of Royal Lytham’s original site: the tenth and eighteenth holes are direct descendants of the earliest layout, and their greens are said to be the oldest in the region. The course has more than a few undistinguished holes, but it also has some tremendous ones. Maybe the best is the 450-yard, par-4 seventh, called Penance. Its left side is flanked by grassy ditches, which serve the same depraved purpose as the church-pew bunkers at Oakmont. Shots to the green generally play into a fierce wind, and they tend to end up at the bottom of a trench, in one of the numerous bunkers, under a spavined bush on a bank that hugs the rear left corner of the green, or against a shed just beyond the bushes. Another superb hole is the ninth, a claustrophobia-inducing par 3, which Bobby Jones liked well enough to measure, in 1926, for possible reproduction elsewhere.

Ninth green, St. Annes Old Links. That’s the clubhouse beyond it.

You might also see a helicopter. That’s Brendan on the left, walking toward the roller coaster.

British Open Countdown: The Masons Arms

Posted on July 17, 2012 by David Owen

The apostrophe is a relatively recent addition.

Alfie Fyles, who caddied for Tom Watson in all five of his Open victories, grew up in Birkdale and frequented a Southport pub and caddie hangout called the Masons Arms. On my first golf trip to the Lancashire coast, a little over fifteen years ago, I decided to make a pilgrimage. I found the pub on a forbidding side street and sailed through the door, anticipating an evening of colorful storytelling. Instantly, I wished I hadn’t come. The patrons looked like—well, they looked like British caddies, but they were indoors, boisterous, in a group, and drunk. The bartender was sitting on a foot-tall stool, so that his head was barely visible above the bar. Oddly, he seemed scarier in that position than he did when he stood up. I made the mistake of sitting at a small table directly below the wall-mounted television set, which most of the patrons were watching. During breaks in the action on the screen, they would permit their chilling gaze to drift downward. I drank my beer as fast as I could and fled back to my hotel, the dowdy Prince of Wales.

British Open Countdown: Birthplace of the Beatles

Posted on July 16, 2012 by David Owen

Other members of the tour group I joined in 1983, Strawberry Field, Liverpool. The photographer is Steve Shipman.

Almost thirty years ago, on assignment for a British newspaper and an American magazine, I traveled to England with a tour group of sixty-seven American Beatles fans. (The tour members’ interest in the Beatles was not casual; one woman had tried to kill herself, twice, after the murder of John Lennon.) Our itinerary was divided between London—where we visited EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, drove past the apartment where Brian Epstein committed suicide, and stripped leaves from a shrub on property formerly owned by Paul McCartney—and Liverpool, which the tour members viewed as the promised land, and which is twenty-five miles as the seagull flies from Royal Lytham & St. Annes, where the Open begins this week.

Penny Lane, Liverpool, 1983.

The statement “We’re going to Liverpool on holiday” has no exact equivalent in American English. (Roughly comparable: “We’re spending our honeymoon in Cleveland.”) Londoners snorted derisively when we mentioned our destination. “It’s an industrial city but not an industrious one,” I was told, through smirking laughter, in a London pub. Even Liverpuddlians were taken aback by the tour members’ enthusiasm. They were used to being the butt of jokes, not the objects of adoration.

The “shelter in the middle of the roundabout,” Penny Lane, Liverpool, 1983.

For a non-fanatic, Liverpool’s charms are harder to see, but they exist, as I’ve been reminded each time I’ve returned. The city’s suburbs and their fabled golf courses are lovely—specially Formby and the villages of the Wirral. The city itself is not as bleak as it’s made out to be; even in the seedier precincts along the wharves, you can catch glimpses of what used to be one of the world’s premier seaports. And, of course, the Beatles.

Celeste Simone Sabatini, American Beatles lover, Liverpool, 1983.

At the time of that initial trip, I was still almost a decade away from discovering golf; when I first went back, in the mid-1990s, I had time for nothing else. The Beatles were still a presence, though. One day, when I couldn’t get on anywhere else, I played a round at Southport Municipal Golf Club. The course wasn’t much, and many of the regulars were local lowlifes who had been prompted by the excitement of the Ryder Cup to give up rugby for golf, which they treated as a contact sport.

Still, I had fun, as I always do. One of my playing partners was a retired businessman who had recently given up tennis for golf but whose age, he said, made him undesirable as a candidate for membership at the distinguished private clubs in the area. When I asked him about his working years in Liverpool, he said, “I knew Jim McCartney, who was Paul’s father. We were both in the cotton business, and his office was next to mine. There was a time when we were both dealing in Iranian cotton. I had better shippers and was offering a better price, but Jim was getting all the business. I later found out why: he supplied a signed photograph of the Beatles with every order. He used to fret terribly about Paul’s future. He desperately wanted him to go to university, because what sort of future could there be for a musician?”

Sunbathing, British-style, on the beach at Blackpool, 1983. The tower in the upper right hand corner is visible from Royal Lytham & St. Annes.

British Open Countdown: A Great Golf Trip

Posted on July 15, 2012 by David Owen

Tony, Rick, Hacker (real name), David O., Brendan, David W., Tim, Other Gene, Ray, Hillside Golf Club, England, May, 2010.

My friends and I have taken some terrific golf trips over the past dozen years, including one to Scotland and two to Ireland. Our best trip ever, though, may have been the one we took in the spring of 2010 to the part of England where the Open Championship will be played this week. England’s Lancashire coast—which is also known as the Golf Coast—contains one of the world’s densest concentrations of superb links courses, including three on the Open Rota (Royal Liverpool, Royal Birkdale, and this week’s venue, Royal Lytham & St. Annes.) My friends and I played fourteen rounds on eleven courses in eight days, and over dinner on the final night we went around the table and each named the one course we’d most like to play again. There were nine of us, and we picked eight different courses.

The do-over course I named at dinner on the final night: Southport & Ainsdale, which I hadn’t even expected to like. That’s Birkdale Cemetery in the distance.

One reason the trip worked so well is that we did very little driving. The distance by air between Royal Liverpool (at the southern end) and Royal Lytham (at the northern end) is less than thirty miles, and we rented three three-bedroom apartments in Southport, a resort town roughly halfway between them. The rent worked out to something like $30 per man per day. We had views of the Irish Sea, and we could walk into town.

Extremely light housekeeping: my bedroom in our apartment in Southport. Note the necktie, which was required for dinner in the clubhouse at Royal Lytham & St. Annes.

We spent just one night away from our apartments, in nine single rooms in the Dormy House at Royal Lytham. That club offers several package deals, and they’re a bargain. We got two rounds of golf on the championship course, three meals in the clubhouse, and a night in the Dormy House for less than the à-la-carte price of two rounds of golf.

The Dormy House at Royal Lytham & St. Annes.

My bedroom window looked out on the practice putting green, the eighteenth green, and the clubhouse (the building on the left).

The view from my room in the Dormy House.

Lytham is the only Open course that begins with a par 3, a 200-plus-yarder with a circular green surrounded by ravenous bunkers. My favorite hole on the course is another par 3, the ninth, which looks like a golf hole in a dream: the green is elevated and undulating, like a graduate-level problem in topology. It’s tucked into the farthest corner of the course, and a cluster of red-brick buildings rises directly behind it, and if you flub your tee shot, an assistant pro told me, you can easily make 10.

Ninth green: don’t be long; don’t be short; don’t go right; don’t go left.

Within the city limits of Southport are three excellent courses—Royal Birkdale, Hillside, and Southport & Ainsdale—and one quite good one: Hesketh, which is the home of the Hitler Tree. The first three are laid out almost continuously along the coast to the south of town; they are so close together that if you miss the driveway for Birkdale, heading south, the handiest place to turn around is the side street that leads to Hillside. And at Hillside it’s entirely possible to hook a ball onto Southport & Ainsdale. I’ll have more to say about all those courses, and the others we played, later this week.

David O., Gene P., Royal Lytham.

Beef Box*: Slow-Play Annoyance